“…Some people are cleverer or more musical or better poets than others and perhaps genes play a role there…. But those genes are not inherited in racial packages. And so, if you want to think about how the limits of individual human capability are set by genetic inheritance, it won’t help you to think about races. Race is something we make; it is not something that makes us.

And so questions arise: Why have the divisions of colour proved so resistant to evidence and argument? Why did the Enlightenment spirit of rational inquiry fail to consign these hierarchies to the ash heap of history, alongside so many other discarded notions? What has gone wrong in the longstanding global conversation about colour?”

Kwame Anthony Appiah: 2016 Reith Lectures Creed, County, Colour, Culture